I drive the world’s smallest moving van.

You might dismiss it at first as just a 2007 Toyota hatchback with a ding in the door. But if you see me zip zip zipping by you — I’m late. Get out of my way — you’ll notice that I’ve got a dining room chair in the trunk. The complete works of Dickens? They’re stuffed under the backseat, next to the coffee pot, behind the toaster.

I contemplated strapping the microwave to the roof, but I couldn’t find any rope.

Like many of my friends and relations, I am obsessed with furniture but not in a fun “Let’s go to Crate and Barrel and sit on the pretty couches and then just buy a cheeseboard” kind of way. More in a “Got it, got it, got it, need it” kind of way. As in: End table? Got it. Cedar chest? Got it. Kitchen chair? Got it. Storage locker? Need it.

I have parents who I am helping to downsize, and who have more furniture than space. And I have kids who are, well, let’s call it “betwixting.”

Here’s how to use betwixting in conversation: “My kid went off to university. Then he came home for the summer. Then he rented a house with his friends, grabbed our waffle iron and the good frying pan and moved out again. Also, have you seen the coffee table anywhere? Yeah, well, guess that’s what you’ve got to expect when you’ve got a kid who’s betwixting. What about you, Mildred?”

Our older kid has betwixted once already; he moved out for a few months to housesit and then came back. That’s okay by me; he makes pretty good coffee, plus he’s got a subscription to Entertainment Weekly.

His brother is finishing up high school but he’ll no doubt be betwixting in the next year or two, so we’ve just spent a couple of days touring university campuses with him. (Note to urban planners: Couldn’t these institutions be a little more compact? They’re pretty and all, but those quads and trees and science buildings suck up a lot of acreage. So very much walking. And the stairs! It felt like an endurance hike, minus the protein bars.)

First-year students are often guaranteed residence; the rooms we saw were still empty, the tiny kitchens blissfully clean. Come back in a month or so and I’ll bet you’ll have trouble finding the floor.

In years two, three and four, residence isn’t always a given and this is where the serious betwixting begins. Houses are rented, leases are signed, before it perhaps occurs to anybody that these places need a couple of lawn chairs and all the contents of Ikea’s “As Is” department to spruce them up (Ikea: Swedish for “I dropped the blurgedy blurg Allen key under the kerfuttily furtle bookshelf”).

As I drive around and around with my parents’ stuff in the trunk, I dream of a repository where grandparents’ castoffs would be kept until a third-year student all of a sudden develops a need for a slow cooker. A place that would not cost several hundred dollars a month to rent like my newly acquired storage locker where, apparently, I am not allowed to live (the sales associate told me as much when I paid the first month’s rent; this immediately made me want to move right in. My friends, it has been a long, long time since I have had a completely empty room to contemplate. Parenthood does not lend itself to minimalism).

This grandparent-to-student transfer station would have everything one generation has seen fit to discard — excess pots and pans, an abundance of lamps — but that a new generation might find useful. A place that people everywhere could come to and . . . what? Oh. A friend has just informed me that such a place already exists.

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